Free hosting drama has brought my site postings to a virtual standstill in the last 6-8 months. It took me a long time to decide on a new home for my websites, which is why there haven’t been too many entries on subjects such as gardening or cooking.

But I think I’ve found at semi-permanent home at cloud hosts Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Both cloud services offered a free tier on which I could flex my Linux muscle and try self-hosting WordPress remotely.

After several weeks of experimentation and false starts (notably a Bitnami solution that was a headache to learn on top of all the other things I need to be familiar with), I can report that my sites are back up and running. At least temporarily. If administration doesn’t suck up too much of time, I hope to catch up on all the posts from the past year, which I will likely compress in weekly or monthly summaries.

Suffice it to say, my current hosting set up consists of Ubuntu 16.04 running Apache/PHP/MariaDB, with Webmin control panel for client administration. There’s obviously more under the hood, but these are the major aspects.